Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 31, 1994                   TAG: 9401310029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BRENDAN RILEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ELKO, NEV.                                LENGTH: Medium

OLD WEST POETRY'S NO JOKE TO THESE RHYMIN' COWPOKES

It means capturing the spirit of the Old West.

"There isn't anybody else out there who can represent us and speak to who we are," said Wallace McRae, a rancher from Forsyth, Mont. "So we do it ourselves."

The 10th Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which ended Sunday, featured about 150 poets and drew thousands of people to this small, isolated northeastern Nevada town in the dead of winter.

Hal Cannon, a founder of the gathering and artistic director of the Western Folklife Center, said when he and others proposed the idea they were told "this was the most hare-brained scheme in the world."

"It has taken me 10 years to believe them," Cannon said.

The poets who show up aren't just old-timers whose simple country verse makes people smile - or snicker. Poets run from 8 to 80, and their work ranges from doggerel to poetic pearls with complex rhyming schemes.

McRae, who was at the first gathering in 1985, said cowboy poets capture the truth behind Old West myths. One way is through humor, an element in his classic, "Reincarnation," which helped established his reputation.

The closing section reads:

In a while the grass'll grow upon yer rendered mound.

Till some day on yer moldered grave a lonely flower is found.

And say a hoss should wander by and graze upon this flower

that once wuz you, but now's become yer vegetative bower.

The posey that the hoss done ate up, with his other feed,

makes bone, and fat, and muscle essential to the steed.

But some is left that he can't use and so it passes through

and finally lays upon the ground, this thing that once wuz you.

Then say, by chance, I wanders by and sees this upon the ground,

and I ponders, and I wonders at this object that I found.

I thinks of reincarnation, of life, and death, and such,

and come away concludin': Slim, you ain't changed all that much.